German Historical Institute London
BULLETIN ISSN 0269-8552
Ulrike Lindner: Imperialism and Globalization: Entanglements and Interactions between the British and German Colonial Empires in Africa before the First World War German Historical Institute London Bulletin, Vol 32, No. 1 (May 2010), pp 4-28 Copyright © 2010 German Historical Institute London. All rights reserved.
ARTICLE
IMPERIALISM AND GLOBALIZATION: ENTANGLEMENTS AND INTERACTIONS BETWEENTHE BRITISH AND GERMAN COLONIAL EMPIRES
IN AFRICA BEFORE THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Ulrike Lindner
This article is based on a lecture organized by the German Historical InstituteLondon in cooperation with the Seminar in Modern German History,Institute of Historical Research, University of London and held at the GHILon 28 Jan. 2010.
1 Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich,2006); see also id. and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds.), Das Kaiserreich trans -national (Göttingen 2004).
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I. Introduction
This article addresses the tensions between increasing technical andeconomic globalization and a tendency towards excessive nationalrivalry in the period of high imperialism, that is, during the finaldecades before the First World War. In particular, it focuses on oneextremely important aspect of this tension, namely, the colonial com-mitments of two European powers who were neighbours in Africa.In recent years, much has been written about the conjunction ofprocesses of globalization and the growth of nationalist tendencies atthis time, especially in studies of the German Kaiserreich.1 Inter -actions between the neighbouring colonies of European empires,however, have hardly been looked at in this context. Yet an analysisof relations between the colonial powers and their mutual percep-tions can crucially contribute to a better understanding of this ten-sion, and of the period of high imperialism as a whole.
To a large extent, the period under investigation here was shapedby growing rivalries and increasing diplomatic tension between the
European nations, and especially between Germany and Britain.Britain increasingly saw German naval policy as a threat, whileGerman radical nationals in turn perceived ‘perfidious Albion’ astheir main antagonist, blocking Germany’s ambitions to become aworld power.2 Their quarrels and rivalries have often been the topicof historical analyses, and traditional diplomatic history has seenthese as the dominant characteristic of this period.3
However, the years from the 1880s to the beginning of the FirstWorld War also witnessed a large spurt in globalization, resulting ina world which was interconnected in many ways. This period is seenas a time of ‘great acceleration’, as Christopher Bayly puts it in hisbook The Birth of the Modern World.4 Technical and economic global-ization also reached Africa. There, international connections oftendeveloped as the European powers cooperated on such matters aslaying telegraph lines and establishing steamer connections in Africa.Germany was initially obliged to connect to the already established
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2 On German naval policy, see Volker R. Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan (Düssel -dorf, 1971) and Wilhelm Deist, Marine und Marinepolitik im kaiserlichenDeutschland 1871–1914 (Düsseldorf, 1972). On the contemporary perceptionof Germany as a threat to Britain see e.g. Ellis Barker, ‘Anglo-GermanDifferences and Sir Edward Grey’, Fortnightly Review (1912), 447–62. TheGerman extreme nationalist view of the British is discussed in PeterWalkenhorst, Nation—Volk—Rasse: Radikaler Nationalismus im DeutschenKaiserreich 1890–1914 (Göttingen, 2007). On radical nationalism in Germanyin general see Geoff Eley, Wilhelminismus, Nationalismus, Faschismus: Zur hi -storischen Kontinuität in Deutschland (Münster, 1996).3 See esp. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914(London, 1980), 441–63. See also Zara Steiner, Britain and the Origins of theFirst World War (London, 1977), 42–78; Klaus Hildebrand, ‘Zwischen Allianzund Antagonismus: Das Problem bilateraler Normalität in den britisch-deutschen Beziehungen des 19. Jahrhunderts 1870–1914’, in Heinz Dollinger,Horst Gründer, and Alwin Hanschmidt (eds.), Weltpolitik. Europagedanke.Regionalismus: Festschrift für Heinz Gollwitzer (Munich, 1982), 305–31; GustavSchmidt, ‘Der deutsch-englische Gegensatz im Zeitalter des Imperialismus’,in Henning Köhler (ed.), Deutschland und der Westen: Vorträge und Dis kus -sionsbeiträge des Symposiums zu Ehren von Gordon A. Craig (Berlin, 1984),59–81; and Jean Stengers, ‘British and German Imperial Rivalry: A Con -clusion’, in Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis (eds.), Britain and Ger -many in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven, 1967), 337–50.4 Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Con -nections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004).
British telegraph network in South and East Africa, and in the yearsthat followed, the newly built telegraph networks in the interior ofthe German and British colonies were connected in many places.5 Inparticular, the speed at which information travelled changed.Whereas letters had previously taken months, messages could nowbe sent home quickly by telegraph, and the steamer lines made it pos-sible for goods and people to be transported ever more quickly. Thiswas true not only of connections between the motherland and thecolony, but also of those linking the colonies of different Europeanempires.6
Similarly, economic globalization did not stop at the colonies.Companies established themselves in the colonies of variousEuropean nations, and trading networks were extended. Streams ofindentured labour, which were shifted around between the coloniesof the British Empire in particular, were another phenomenon.Entrepreneurs in the German colonies, only recently incorporatedinto the imperial context, also wanted to profit from this movementof labour.7
The various aspects of technical and economic globalization madeit possible for the European powers and their colonies to take a closeinterest in each other. It also enabled an increased transfer of knowl-edge, and faster cooperation between the colonies. It is, of course,critical to note here that, in contrast to what we think of as globaliza-tion today, developments then involved first and foremost an expan-sion of European empires. European or Western technologies result-ed in a new world formation which, even if it created global inter-connections such as the migration of Chinese and Indian indentured
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5 Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century SouthAfrica and Britain (London, 2001), 6; Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 20;Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels Petersson, Geschichte der Globalisierung(Munich, 2003), 64–5, 67. On British telegraph connections in general see PaulM. Kennedy, ‘Imperial Cable Communications and Strategy, 1870–1914’,English Historical Review, 86 (1971), 728–52.6 Dirk van Laak, Imperiale Infrastruktur: Deutsche Planungen für eine Er schlie ßungAfrikas (Paderborn, 2004), 35–40 and 91–3. For the consequences of fastercommunications, see also Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 461.7 See Ulrike Lindner, ‘Transnational Movements between Colonial Empires:Migrant Workers from the British Cape Colony in the German DiamondTown Lüderitzbucht’, European Review of History, 16 (2009), 679–96.
labourers to Africa, always displayed considerable differences in lev-els of power. At the same time, closer links between the imperial pow-ers, both in Europe and overseas, precipitated attempts at culturaldemarcation and gave rise to an emphasis on the individual nationalstyles of imperial and colonial powers. The two processes—intercon-nection and demarcation—were in most cases closely intertwined.
I will argue here that the concepts of colonial rule and the concreteinteraction between the colonial rulers of Africa quite clearly embod-ied the growing trend towards connection and cooperation, and weremuch less influenced by antagonisms than relations in Europe, espe-cially during the last years before the First World War.8 In Africa, thecolonial rulers could always focus on common challenges thrown upby their dealings with the Other, the colonized Africans, and theestablishment of colonial rule in unknown African countries.
Traditional diplomatic history has usually interpreted the differ-ences between the discourses of colonial policy and antagonistic for-eign policy by suggesting that before 1914 the colonial periphery wasinsignificant as it was unable to have any impact on growing Euro -pean rivalries.9 From a less Eurocentric perspective influenced morestrongly by global history, however, overlapping developments canbe discerned. Global interconnectedness and understanding couldsimultaneously be found in demarcation processes and rivalry be -tween the European imperial nations, although sometimes in differ-ent contexts and in different geographical locations.10 This perspec-tive responds to Jürgen Osterhammel’s call to see the nineteenth cen-tury not just as leading up to the First World War, but to allow spacefor approaches other than the paradigm of European rivalry.11
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8 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony:Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in id. and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.), Tensionsof Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997), 3–42, 13.9 See e.g. Michael Fröhlich, Von der Konfrontation zur Koexistenz: Die deutsch-englischen Kolonialbeziehungen in Afrika zwischen 1884 und 1914 (Bochum,1990), 327–8; and Kennedy, Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 415.10 For a perspective that presents the world around 1900 as created by a vari-ety of non-Eurocentric developments see e.g. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World,esp. 451–87.11 Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahr -hun derts (Munich, 2009), 578–9.
On the following pages, I will concentrate on the tensions be -tween rivalries and the trend towards globalization in the colonialworld of Africa.12 I shall begin with some general remarks aboutaspects of colonial cooperation in Africa, which was considerablyadvanced by the globalization spurt before the First World War.Then, taking as examples the Herero and Nama war in GermanSouth-West Africa and the growing influence of Indian and Chineseindentured labour in German and British southern Africa, I willshow how much globalization on the one hand and demarcationprocesses on the other influenced the imperial world before the FirstWorld War, and how strongly the different trends were connectedwith each other. The encounters and mutual perceptions between thetwo colonizers and between the colonies are analysed as an entan-gled history,13 which I understand primarily as a concept bridgingclassical comparative history and an investigation of transferprocesses.14
II. Trends Toward Cooperation among the Colonizers in Africa
The mutual perceptions of the two colonizing powers involved a con-siderable degree of envy, as well as efforts to demarcate nationalcolonial styles, which in many respects revived the old stereotype of
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12 The present article is based on the research conducted for my Habilitationthesis, entitled ‘Colonial Encounters: Germany and Great Britain as ImperialPowers in Africa before the First World War’. In this study, I investigate colo-nial practices, their mutual reception, and interactions between neighbour-ing colonizing European powers. Geographically, the thesis deals withneighbouring colonies in East Africa and South Africa, specifically, Germanand British East Africa and German South-West Africa and the Cape Colony.13 Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Vergleich, Transfer, Ver -flechtung: Der Ansatz der Histoire Croisée und die Herausforderung desTransnationalen’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 28 (2002), 607–36; and SebastianConrad and Shalini Randeria, Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Per -spektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main, 2002),17–22.14 Hartmut Kaelble, ‘Die interdisziplinären Debatten über Vergleich undTransfer’, in id. and Jürgen Schriewer (eds.), Vergleich und Transfer: Kom para -tistik in den Sozial-, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main,2003), 477.
British–German relations, including that of the pioneer and late-comer.15 This was quite obvious among the German colonial officials,settlers, and colonial agitators. While the British, with their empirespanning the globe, provided a model of experienced colonial rule,there was always a desire among the Germans to develop their own,presumably superior, colonial style, separate from that of the Britishco lo nial power. The British side almost always used the German ex -ample to present themselves as the more experienced, better colonialrulers in comparison with the Germans.16 Here, the transnational ele-ment played an important part in sharpening the identity of the col-onizer. Such efforts at national demarcation can be found during thewhole period before 1914, sometimes more in the foreground, some-times less.
During their final years as neighbours in Africa between 1907 and1914—after the wars in the German colonies and before the start ofthe First World War—a considerable shift can be observed. Anotherimportant element came to the fore. The common aspects of theEuropean mission in Africa were now emphasized by both sides, andthe exchange of colonial knowledge and skills between the two pow-ers was foregrounded. This was closely linked to the growing inter-connectedness of the colonies within the framework of technicalglobalization around 1900, which made this sort of transfer of knowl-edge possible in the first place.17
The aspect of cooperation played a central part under GermanColonial Secretary Bernhard Dernburg, who was in office from 1906to 1910. He himself admitted, retrospectively, that whenever he hadhad difficulties with a colonial problem, he had found a solution by
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15 See e.g. Hartmut Berghoff and Dieter Ziegler, Pionier und Nachzügler? Ver -gleichende Studien zur Geschichte Großbritanniens und Deutschland im Zeit alterder Industrialisierung: Festschrift für Sidney Pollard zum 70. Geburtstag(Bochum, 1995).16 For the German side see e.g. Paul Rohrbach, Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft:Kulturpolitische Grundsätze für die Rassen- und Missionsfragen (Berlin, 1909),30–1; Max von Brandt, Die englische Kolonialpolitik und Kolonialverwaltung(Halle, 1906). For British critiques of German colonialism see e.g. Fröhlich,Von der Konfrontation zur Koexistenz, 233–66.17 See Ulrike Lindner, ‘Colonialism as a European Project in Africa before1914? British and German Concepts of Colonial Rule in Sub-Saharan Africa’,Comparativ, 19 (2009), 88–106, 103–5.
studying British methods.18 Dernburg, who was an admirer of Britishcolonization, had travelled in the various British colonies in Africaand had modelled his reform programmes on British colonial poli-cy.19 He regarded cooperation between neighbouring colonial rulersas essential for the successful colonization of Africa, as he oncestressed in a talk he gave in London in 1909:
Most parts of Africa now under British and German dominionhave not been acquired by force of arms, but more or less by acommon understanding of the European nations and by amore or less complete consent of the governed indigenousraces. . . . The truth of this contention had happily been recog-nized by the two nations in a number of practical terms.20
The two imperial powers also wanted to learn from each other. Evenif the relationship between Britain and Germany was undoubtedlyasymmetrical in the colonial context, during the final years before theFirst World War this factor featured more strongly in the British viewof the African colonies. An article published in the Bulletin of the RoyalColonial Institute in 1912 stated programmatically that the Germanswould always be willing to learn from the British, and that the Britishshould do this as well and begin to learn from the Germans in colo-nial matters.21 In January 1914 Professor Julius Bonn, a German colo-
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18 The Times, 23 June 1914.19 Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (hereafter BAB) R 1001/6938, passim; andR 1001/6882/1 (Dernburg to Imperial Governor of German Dependencies,17 Nov. 1906), fos. 36–7 for Dernburg’s suggestion of a ten-year reform pro-gramme in the German colonies, sent to the governors of the German depend-encies, which incorporates several ideas drawn from the English colonies. Seealso BAB R 1001/6938 (Dernburg on questions regarding ‘native’ policy.Speech of 18 Feb. 1908), where England is portrayed as a role model for itsdevelopment of an economically rational colonial policy. Point ing to the Eng -lish example, Dernburg demands better treatment for the indigenous popu-lations of the colonies. 20 Quoted from The Times, 6 Nov. 1909.21 Louis Hamilton, ‘The German Colonies 1910–1911’, United Empire, 3 (1912),970. On this attitude, which prevailed under the Liberal government in par-ticular, see Ronald Hyam, Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office 1905–1908:The Watershed of the Empire Commonwealth (London, 1968), 429.
nial expert, delivered a lecture about German colonialism at a meet-ing of the Royal Colonial Society in London,22 which was very posi-tively received by the British press. In Germany, the English colonialwriter and former Governor of Uganda, Sir Harry Johnston, alsoemphasized the cooperation between the two nations in the Africancolonies in his lecture to the German Colonial Society (DeutscheKolonialgesellschaft):
At present I am not aware of any conflicts of interest betweenour two great nations in the black parts of the earth; no chi-canery, no rivalry of the sort that unhappily manifested itselfearlier, while these possessions were being acquired, shouldbecome apparent. We have both learned to walk hand in handin our great battles with rebellious nature, in tasks such ascombating tropical diseases and other problems.23
This form of exchange can also be observed at the highest level of thecolonial administration. German Colonial Secretary Wilhelm Solf vis-ited British Nigeria while travelling in West Africa in 1913. Thereafter,he maintained a close correspondence with Governor FrederickLugard, inventor of the concept of indirect rule, a form of colonial rulethat was seen in Britain at the time as being non-invasive, cheap, andmild. He had published a great deal on the theory and practice ofcolonialism in Africa, and Solf was very interested in Lugard’s ideas.They exchanged their last letters in June 1914. Solf wrote to Lugardthat he had profited very much from the information he had receivedand that he would try to put some of the measures that Lugard hadtaken up in Nigeria into practice in the German colony of Cameroon.24
It was very clear that the two colonial politicians not only valueda polite correspondence, but that they aspired to an intense mutualreception of colonial knowledge. The goal was always to strengthentheir own position as imperial rulers but, in the view of contempo-raries as well, this was only possible by means of cooperation. This
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22 Julius Bonn, ‘German Colonial Policy’, United Empire, 5 (1914), 126.23 ‘Interkoloniales Verständnis: Eine Wertschätzung deutscher Leistungenvon englischer Seite’, Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, 7 May 1910.24 Bundesarchiv Koblenz (hereafter BAK), N 1053/41 (Solf to Lugard, 16 June1914).
constant mutual observation and desire to learn from each otherseems to me to point to a further phenomenon, one which Ann LauraStoler has aptly named the ‘Politics of Imperial Comparisons’:‘Claiming exceptionalism and investing in strategic comparison arefundamental elements of an imperial formation’s commandinggrammar.’25 It also implies that the constant perception of, and com-parison with, other imperial powers always served to legitimate theself, and to justify the constant exceptional regulations that everyempire used.
In my opinion these tendencies go far beyond the forms of ‘gov-ernmental internationalism’ examined by Madeleine Herren for theperiod before the First World War. Whereas Herren related ‘govern-mental internationalism’ mostly to exchanges in technical and scien-tific fields, which were dominated by experts rather than by politi-cians, and which were considered of little strategic importance, Iwould agree with Ann Stoler that the exchange and comparison withother empires should be regarded as an original imperial strategy ofgreat significance.26 Thus the close interconnection and increased ex -change of information which were only made possible by globaliza-tion were always closely intertwined with attempts at demarcation.On the whole, they represented an integral part of imperial policy.
III. Globalization Tendencies versus Imperial Rivalry and NationalDemarcation: Two Examples
1. Cooperation during the Herero and Nama War
In addition to mutual observation and the exchange of knowledge,we can also find specific examples of military and commercial coop-eration in the colonies. The German war against the Herero andNama (1904–7) in German South-West Africa, including the genocide
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25 Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan, ‘Introduction: Refiguring Im -per ial Terrains’, in eaed. and Peter C. Perdue (eds.), Imperial Formations(Santa Fe, N. Mex., 2007), 12.26 Madeleine Herren, ‘Governmental Internationalism and the Beginning ofa New World Order in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Martin H. Geyer andJohannes Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society,and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (Oxford, 2000), 121–44.
of the Herero, has already been broadly investigated. Interaction andcooperation between Germans and their British neighbours duringthe war, however, has attracted hardly any attention so far. An exam-ination of this aspect, first, provides a new view of the war and, sec-ondly, permits a discussion of the tensions between national demar-cation and increasing interconnectedness furthered by globalization.
The behaviour of the German troops in the war was minutelyobserved by the British. The Foreign Office, the Cape administration,and the British public all criticized the Germans’ brutal treatment ofthe indigenous population in general and African women and pris-oners of war in particular. British observers mostly blamed the inex-perience of the Germans for the radicalization and escalation of thewar into genocide.27 At the same time, they presented their own colo-nial rule as exemplary, with British circumspection and more flexiblerule allegedly allowing such conflicts to be avoided. Nonetheless,during this long war, the most diverse forms of interaction occurredbetween the two colonial powers, making it clear that the war wasan integral part of a large number of complex relationships betweenthe colonies and the two metropoles.
Here I shall first discuss military cooperation. During the war, theBritish officers Colonel Trench and later Major Wade were attachedto General von Trotha’s headquarters, from where they reportedtechnical details about the conduct of the war. They filed fortyreports, each about twenty pages long, which were telegraphed tothe War Office in London.28 The British side could be so quicklyinformed about the German colonial war only because the Germancolonies were connected to the British telegraph system in Africa. Atthe end of the war, in 1907, the last important Nama leader, Morenga,whose guerrilla tactics had repeatedly allowed him to evade captureby the German military, was finally killed in the Cape Colony in ajoint operation undertaken by the German and British military actingtogether. Despite fundamental criticism of German methods, the
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27 The National Archives, Kew, Public Record Office (hererafter TNA PRO)WO 106/265 (Gleichen, Military Attaché, British Embassy Berlin, 8 Apr.1904): ‘Briefly, the real source must be sought in the ignorance of the Germanregarding the main principles of colonial administration and dealing withthe natives.’ 28 See TNA PRO WO 106/268 and 269, passim.
British aim was to achieve a close exchange of information aboutcolonial warfare at imperial level, and to this end the British andGermans cooperated militarily against the African people. Wars andrebellions endangered the predominant position of the white popu-lation in Africa in general; cooperation was therefore necessarydespite differing styles of rule.
Economic networks, too, covered a considerable area. Goodsdelivered from the Cape Colony supplied the German troops, andlabourers and transport workers migrated from the British colony toseek work in the overheated war economy of the German colony. Infact, the government of the Cape Colony insisted that only suppliesdestined for the civilian population could be delivered to the Germancolony because they did not want to be drawn into the German war,preferring to distance themselves from the German colonial strategy.Thus the border was repeatedly closed to German transports.29
Nonetheless, the bulk of supplies for the German troops came fromthe Cape Colony. As deliveries to the south of the German colony,which was hardly settled by civilians, increased hugely, it must havebeen clear to all those in positions of responsibility that these goodscould only be destined for the German military. After all, the popu-lation in the south of the colony had not suddenly increased enor-mously. From December 1904, some of the deliveries were sent viaPort Nolloth in the north west of the Cape Colony. From there, goodsfor the German troops were taken on carts drawn by oxen or donkeysstraight across the German border on the Orange River. The Germanmilitary hired civilians from the Cape Colony to accompany thesetransports. From 1905, there were always between 1,500 and 1,800people working in this capacity, including many Boers and Britons
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29 See Tilman Dedering, ‘War and Mobility in the Borderlands of SouthWest ern Africa in the Early Twentieth Century’, International Journal ofAfrican Historical Studies, 39 (2006), 275–94, who shows that the CapeColony’s borders were closed on thirty occasions. Dedering also stresses theCape Colony’s critical attitude towards German colonies, but overlooks theeconomic interests involved and the Foreign Office’s at times very differentattitude towards the Germans. See also Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction:Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY,2005), 131–51.
who were farmers in the Cape Colony, but were glad to be recruitedfor short periods because of the good pay.30
The war against the Nama in the south of the colony could neverhave been conducted without the supplies of munitions, food, hors-es, and people provided by the Cape Colony. In February 1906 alone,1,400 horses arrived in the harbours of German South-West Africafrom the Cape Colony.31 As German South-West Africa producedhardly any food, all provisions had to be imported. Lüderitz Bay,which was located in the desert landscape of the south of the Germancolony and became an army base for German troops in the Namawar, had no water springs in the immediate vicinity. Therefore evenwater for the German troops had to be shipped in tankers from CapeTown to the desert-like areas of southern Namibia.32 Thus very closeeconomic ties were established between the two colonies.
The Cape Colony did exceedingly well out of the war economy,and for this reason there was little interest in stopping this type ofsupport. After the Boer War (1899–1902), the colony found itself inrecession, so the Cape government was keen to profit economicallyfrom the war in the German colony. However, externally, the appear-ance of a certain degree of neutrality was to be kept up, as a letterfrom the South African high commissioner to the colonial secretary inLondon makes clear:
My ministers, I understand, desire thus to place on record theiradherence to the position which was originally adopted thatsupplies are only allowed to go into German South-WestAfrica for civilian purposes but will shut their eyes to the realdestination of the supplies and will not take any step to inter-fere with the existing arrangements unless it is desired by HisMajesty’s Government that they should do so.33
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30 TNA PRO WO 106/268 (Colonel Trench for favour of transmission to theWar Office, 24 Oct. 1905).31 Ibid. (Colonel Trench for favour of transmission to War Office, 10 Feb.1906).32 TNA PRO WO 106/269 (Major T. H. Wade, 12 Oct. 1906).33 TNA PRO FO 367/9 (Hely-Hutchinson to Elgin, telegram, 6 Mar. 1906), fo.138.
British policy thus wavered between supporting the Germans, andkeeping a distance from the German war in order to make Britishcolonial policy appear in a positive light and not to alarm their ownAfrican subjects.34
Despite the distinction between national colonial styles, however,common imperial interests predominated. In the eyes of the Britishtoo, the dominant position of the white European population inAfrica could ultimately only be maintained by mutual support.35
Cooperation and the transfer of knowledge seemed the obviousmeans of finding solutions to numerous problems on the Africancontinent, and became an important element of imperial rule, at leastuntil 1914. This contrasted with the rivalry of the two nations inEurope, which was increasing sharply just at this time.
2. Indentured Workers in Southern Africa
Everyday contact with the Other, the colonized peoples, was to alarge extent dictated by working conditions in the African colonies.In all of these, Europeans depended on the cheap labour of Africansand other ethnic groups, in the plantations of East and West Africa aswell as on the farms of South Africa and, in general, for all infra-structural projects such as building roads and railways. This appliedespecially to mining in the Union of South Africa and, in the lastyears before the First World War, to diamond mining in German
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34 TNA PRO FO 64/1646 (Memorandum on Actions Taken by the ColonialGovernment Regarding Disturbances in German South-West Africa, En clos -ure No. 2 in Secret Despatch of 25 Feb. 1905: ‘Since April 1904 when rumoursof a further rising in German South-West Africa reached me, it has been asome what difficult task, whilst dealing in a friendly manner with the Ger -man Government, at the same time to keep on a more or less friendly footingwith the natives tribes, a part of whom live in the German territory and partof whom live east of longitude 20° in British territory.’)35 Léon Decle, Three Years in Savage Africa (London, 1898), 535: ‘If it is to beworth the while of the European Powers to govern and exploit these territo-ries, they cannot afford to throw away a single ounce of energy in friction onewith another. Considering the enormous distances and difficulties of trans-port, about which I have already said enough, it is fairly plain that it is onlyby co-operation instead of mutual jealousy that Africa can be made to pay itsway in the very slightest degree.’
South-West Africa.36 In addition to Africans, thousands of membersof other ethnic groups lived in Africa, mostly working as indenturedlabour on plantations or in the mining industry.
The extent of the German colonial empire’s involvement in thesedevelopments has hardly been investigated as yet. I think it pointsconvincingly to the connectedness of the imperial in world in Africabefore the First World War, and provides a good example of the ten-sions between policies of imperial demarcation and trends towardsglobalization.
The immigrant groups I refer to here, mainly Indians andChinese, were classified by most of the racial categorizations in useduring the age of high imperialism as occupying a median positionbetween white and black.37 These racial constructs, moreover, werenever definitive, but were constantly changed and challenged. TheChinese, for example, were long regarded as members of a Kultur -nation, a nation with a highly developed civilization. In the eight -eenth century they were looked upon with admiration, and it was notuntil the middle and end of the nineteenth century that, under theinfluence of new racial theories, they were classified as a lowerMongolian race that was clearly inferior to the white Caucasianrace.38 Contact with these ethnic groups represented a special chal-
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36 On mining in South Africa see Peter Richardson, ‘Chinese IndenturedLabour in the Transvaal Gold Mining Industry, 1904–1910’, in Kay Saunders(ed.), Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834–1920 (London, 1984),260–91.37 See. e.g. Thieme, ‘Die Halbweißen Frage in Samoa’, Berliner Tageblatt (26Mar. 1914), 1, as cited in Horst Gründer (ed.), ‘. . . da und dort ein jungesDeutsch land zu gründen’: Rassismus, Kolonien und kolonialer Gedanke vom 16. biszum 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1999), 295. See also Evelyn Wareham, Race andReal politik: The Politics of Colonisation in German Samoa (Frankfurt am Main,2002), 55; and Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture andRace (London, 1995), 104.38 For the German discourse see Mechthild Leutner, ‘Deutsche Vorstellungenüber China und Chinesen und über die Rolle der Deutschen in China 1890–1945’, in Heng-yü Kuo (ed.), Von der Kolonialpolitik zur Kooperation: Studienzur Geschichte der deutsch-chinesischen Beziehungen (Munich, 1986), 401–43,esp. 409–11. For the discourse on the Chinese in the Empire, see Jan HenningBöttger, ‘ “Es wird aber schwieriger sein, sich ihrer zu entledigen als es jetztist, sie vom Schutzgebiet fernzuhalten”: Kolonialdiskursive Bedin gungenras senpolitischen Handelns am Beispiel der Einfuhr eines Chinesen nach
lenge to the racial concepts of the colonizers, especially for theGerman colonial administrators, who were not familiar with multi-ethnic societies at home or in other colonies. British colonial admin-istrations, by contrast, had long been used to such multi-layeredforms of colonial society in many regions around the world. Theywere not less racist in their approach to these ethnic groups, but hadacquired a certain degree of experience in dealing with the problemsthat arose.
In contrast to the German colonial ad min istration, German entre-preneurs, as representatives of an aspiring colonial nation, were keento be involved in recruiting indentured labour. It had become normalto transport cheap labour on a global scale. Millions of Chinese andIndians were recruited as indentured workers—also called ‘coolies’—and sent around the world, especially within the British Empire.39
Labour was a commodity that could be drawn upon as required bythe plantation and mining industries.40
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Deutsch-Südwestafrika (1906)’, in Frank Becker (ed.), Rassen mischehen—Mischlinge—Rassentrennung (Stuttgart, 2004), 126–7. For the British discourse,see Heinz Gollwitzer, Die gelbe Gefahr: Geschichte eines Schlag worts. Studien zumimperialistischen Denken (Göttingen, 1962), 47–67.39 Michael Mann, ‘Die Mär von der freien Lohnarbeit: Menschenhandel under zwungene Arbeit in der Neuzeit—ein einleitender Essay’, Comparativ, 13(2003), 13. See Saunders (ed.), Indentured Labour for indentured labour in theBritish Empire. See also Martin Legassick and Francine de Clercq, ‘Cap it al -ism and Migrant Labour in Southern Africa: The Origins and Nature of theSystem’, in Shula Marks (ed.), International Labour Migration (Hounslow,1984), 140–60; Pieter Cornelis Emmer, ‘The Meek Hindu: The Recruitment ofIndian Indentured Labourers for Service Overseas, 1870–1916’, in id. andErnst van den Boogaart (eds.), Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labourbefore and after Slavery (Dordrecht, 1986), 187–207. On indentured labour ingeneral, see David Northrup Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge, 1995); and Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: Export ofIndian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (Oxford, 1974). On the distinctionsbetween free, indentured, and slave labour, see Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion,Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001), 1–38.40 Aristide Zolberg refers to about 1 million Indian indentured labourers (inaddition to many other migrants) who left the subcontinent between 1834and 1916 and worked in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Thomas Metcalf men-tions a figure of 1.3 million. See Aristide R. Zolberg, ‘Global Movements,Global Walls: Responses to Migration, 1885–1925’, in Wang Gungwu (ed.),
Whenever there was a shortage of labour in the German colonies,voices were quick to call for cheap ‘coolies’ from India or China.41 Atthe end of the 1880s, about 1,000 Chinese ‘coolies’ were, in fact,recruited for German East Africa, but from Singapore rather thanChina, which did not permit emigration to German East Africa.42
Germany’s Pacific colonies began recruiting Chinese labour around1900, and by 1914 there were about 3,500 Chinese workers livingthere.43 In Ger man South-West Africa, on which I concentrate here,such endeavours began late because the economic structure of thecolony—extensive livestock holdings, no labour-intensive tropicalplantations, and little mining—meant that the labour of ‘coolies’seemed dispensable. But the discovery of diamonds in 1908 and theforced development of the railways from 1905 on meant that theneeds of businessmen in German South-West Africa changed. Bothmining and railway companies wanted to participate in the globallabour market, and from 1910 they attempted to recruit Indian andChinese labour to ‘import’ into the German colony.44
German companies and the colonial administration of GermanSouth-West Africa were mainly influenced by conditions in neigh-
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Global History and Migrations (Boulder, Colo., 1997), 288; and Thomas Metcalf,Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley,2007), 136. See also Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, andIndian Indentured Labor Migration to the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 1998),passim; and Emmer, ‘The Meek Hindu’, 188–94, for Indian indentured labourin the Caribbean. After the end of the Opium War in 1860, when the Chinesegovernor was forced to lift barriers to emigration, a constantly growing net-work emerged which shipped Chinese labourers to America, Africa,Australia, various South East Asian colonies, and South Africa as ‘coolies’.The Chinese emigration was probably the largest non-European migrationmovement of the end of the nineteenth century. Although there are no precisefigures, it is assumed that between 1860 and 1920, around 15 million Chinesemigrated to South East Asia alone. See Zolberg, ‘Global Move ments’, 288–91.41 Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, 168–73.42 Ibid. 213.43 Ibid. 215–17. For Germany’s South Pacific colonies in general, seeHermann Joseph Hiery, Das Deutsche Reich in der Südsee (1900–1921): Eine An -näherung an die Erfahrungen verschiedener Kulturen (Göttingen, 1995); and id.,Die deutsche Südsee 1884–1914 (Paderborn, 2002).44 National Archive of Namibia (thereafter NAN) BLU 30 (Lüderitz BayChamber of Mining to Imperial Government, Windhoek, 2 May 1912).
bouring British South Africa. How conditions there were perceivedhad a considerable impact on German colonial policy, and so I shallbriefly describe them here. The plantations and mining industry ofBritish South Africa had always been based on itinerant and inden-tured labour. Africans from the whole southern part of the continentworked in the gold mines of Witwatersrand, which in 1909 employeda total of about 150,000 workers.45 Indian and Chinese indenturedlabour was also employed in various regions of British South Africa.Indian ‘coolies’ went to Natal as early as 1860 to work on the sugarplantations and later on the tea plantations.46 Many of the immigrantIndians stayed in the British colony after their contracts came to anend. They were not obliged to return home after the expiry of theircontracts, and they often went on to work in other areas, includingthe coal and mining industries. Others became independent traders,or small farmers,47 and were increasingly seen as competition by theEuropean population. Various laws were passed to restrict theirrights, and moves were made to disenfranchise them. Gandhi, in par-ticular, who went to Durban in 1893, opposed discrimination againstIndians. He organized protests against obligatory registration, whichseriously restricted the freedom of movement for all Asians. TheIndian population’s quarrels with the colonial government and, from1910, with the government of the Union of South Africa, cannot bediscussed further here.48 With respect to the transfer of knowledgeand the increasing interconnectedness between the colonial empires,what is important is that the German consuls in the various Britishcolonies, the German Colonial Office (Reichskolonialamt) in Berlin,and the government of German South-West Africa closely followed
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45 Legassick and de Clercq, ‘Capitalism and Migrant Labour in SouthernAfrica’, 141; Richardson, ‘Chinese Indentured Labour’, 262.46 Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 138.47 N. Naicker, ‘Indians in South Africa’, in Anirudha Gupta (ed.), IndiansAbroad: Asia and Africa. Report of an International Seminar (New Delhi, 1971),276–7. See Emmer, ‘The Meek Hindu’, passim, for Indian indentured labourin general.48 On the Indian movement in Natal see Judith Brown (ed.), Gandhi and SouthAfrica: Principles and Politics (Pietermaritzburg, 1994); and Surendra Bhana,Indentured Indian Emigrants to Natal, 1860–1902 (New Delhi, 1991). ForGandhi and the Natal Indian Congress, see Surendra Bhana, Gandhi’s Legacy:The Natal Indian Congress 1894–1994 (Pietermaritzburg, 1997).
discussions concerning the Indian immigrants.49 The government ofthe German colony of South-West Africa paid special attention to thereports from Durban. The success of Gandhi’s movement was seen ashighly problematic by the German observers.50
If we look at the Chinese indentured workers in British SouthAfrica we see that migration started considerably later. The SouthAfrican gold industry had completely collapsed during the Boer War(1899–1902), and reconstruction only began after peace was conclud-ed in 1902. The need for labour increased quickly, and could notimmediately be met by African workers. Between 1904 and 1907,therefore, about 63,000 Chinese indentured labourers were recruitedfor the goldmines in the British colony of Transvaal.51 In theTransvaal, the ‘import’ of Chinese labourers was controversially dis-cussed. White workers and traders in particular feared the competi-tion of the Chinese, and were doubtful about immigration.52 TheChinese therefore had to submit to strict and in many respects inhu-man regulations. The Transvaal administration wanted at all costs toprevent a group of Chinese people from settling permanently in thecolony.53
The reception of the conflicts with Indian and Chinese migrants inBritish South Africa had a considerable impact on the strategies ofGerman colonial policy. The administration of German South-WestAfrica perceived the problems in Britain’s South African colonies asa deterrent, and increasingly regarded the immigration of ‘foreign-
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49 See e.g. Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (hereafter PA AA), R14863, and Die Südafrikanische Union, iv (1910), passim.50 See e.g. the reports from the consulate of Durban, which were collected inWindhoek in a voluminous file entitled ‘Eingeborenen-Verhältnisse in dersüdafrikanischen Union’ (NAN ZBU 2059, passim). Detailed reports were col-lected on passive resistance, newly developed by Gandhi, and on the coalworkers’ strike. See transcript, consulate Durban to Auswärtiges Amt, 11Nov. 1913 and 4 Dec. 1913, fos. 105–30.51 Peter Richardson, ‘Coolies, Peasants and Proletarians: The Origins ofChinese Indentured Labour in South Africa, 1904–1907’, in Marks (ed.),International Labour Migration, 167.52 NAN ZBU 2076, WIV R1 (transcript, German consulate Johannesburg toChancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, 16 Aug. 1912), fo. 43.53 BAB R 1001/8747 (Schnee, Colonial Advisory Board London to GermanForeign Office, Colonial Section, 26 Mar. 1906), fos. 142–3.
ers’ as a threat to its own colonial order. At the level of everyday colo-nial life in German South-West Africa, we can observe this phenom-enon especially in the south of the German colony, in the harbourtown of Swakopmund and the diamond town of Lüderitz Bay, wherethe boom in diamonds created a quickly growing and highly diversesociety. Workers and entrepreneurs moved there from many places,especially from the British Cape Colony.54
In particular, German mine owners and businessmen localized inthe southern region of the colony hoped that by ‘importing’ Indiansand Chinese, they would get better and harder working labourersthan they thought they could find among the country’s indigenouspopulation. African workers from the neighbouring Cape Colony,who also migrated to German South-West Africa in large numbers inorder to work in the diamond fields and on the railways, were high-ly valued, but also considered to be relatively rebellious. The mineowners complained first about the higher wages that they had to paythe ‘Cape boys’, and secondly feared that they would organize andmake more demands:
In order not to become dependent on them [workers from theCape] while having access to the necessary number of work-ers, we urgently need to find replacements from elsewhere. Itherefore regard it as necessary to put into practice the plan,already articulated by the previous management, to obtainChinese for the plant here. The Chinese have proved theirvalue as mineworkers. They work hard and their demands interms of wages and food are moderate.55
However, putting this plan into practice turned out to be difficult, ascommercial interests were inconsistent with the ideas of the Germancolonial administration. Since 1910, the Lüderitz Bay Chamber ofMining had been trying to persuade the government that more immi-gration of indentured labour was required to fill existing labour
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54 For the development of Lüderitz Bay, see Lindner, ‘Transnational Move -ments between Colonial Empires’.55 NAN ZBU 2076, W IV R1 (Otavi Mining and Rail Association to Governorof German South-West Africa, 2 Dec. 1909).
shortages.56 They applied for permission to ‘import’ about 1,000Indian indentured workers. Thereupon the government of GermanSouth-West Africa imposed numerous conditions on the Chamber ofMining: the Indians were to be examined for illness at the place wherethey were recruited, and again before they landed in Africa; they werenot permitted to move to the interior of the country; if Indians with-drew from their labour contracts, they had to be transported home atthe Chamber of Mining’s expense. The regulations were modelledclosely on those that applied to Chinese indentured labourers in theTransvaal.57 Again, we see forms of knowledge exchange betweenempires that were part of everyday colonial policies.
The German colonial government, too, wanted at all costs to pre-vent indentured labourers from settling permanently in the colonyand complicating its racial structure by forming a further groupbetween the African and the European population. The governmentof German South-West Africa already regarded the immigration ofworkers from the Cape Colony as a challenge; the immigration ofother ethnic groups was seen as an even more sensitive matter. Inprinciple, German colonial officials were highly suspicious of Asianimmigration:
All the colonies that put up legal barriers to the immigration ofAsians justify them in the same way, namely, that because oftheir modest needs and low standard of living by comparisonwith Europeans, Asians, and in particular, Indians, Chinese,and Japanese are superior to the white race in the competitivestruggle, and further, that to have a commercially strong Asianpopulation in a colony that belongs to the white race will pre-cipitate dangers and difficulties as they acquire politicalrights.58
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56 National Archives of the Republic of South Africa, Pretoria (hereafterNARS) NTS 201 3038/12/7473 (transcript, Consul Müller to ForeignSecretary, 23 Apr. 1912).57 NAN BLU 30 (Governor of German South-West Africa to District OfficeLüderitz Bay, 20 Apr. 1912). For similar regulations in Transvaal, which theGerman Colonial Office took note of, see BAB R 1001/8747 (transcript,German Consulate General Shanghai to Chancellor von Bülow, 29 July 1904). 58 BAB R 1001 /8731 (The Treatment of Asians in Foreign Colonies, 1912), fo.1.
With regard to the recruitment of Indians, an exception had alreadybeen made in 1910. A German company in South-West Africa,Tsuneb Mine, which had been mining copper and lead in Namibiasince about 1900, had employed around 200 Indian ‘coolies’ as work-ers in the German colony in 1910. They had been recruited not inIndia, but in the Cape Colony, where the hiring of Indian workerswhose contracts had expired was permitted. While this was knownto the government, the details were not. The official responsible, dis-trict officer Blumhagen, merely noted in a letter to the government:‘One does not hear many favourable comments about their produc-tivity.’59
The German colonial administration considered the situation inthe diamond mining region of Lüderitz Bay to be particularly prob-lematic. Many different population groups already lived there, and aBritish consul was on the spot to look after the affairs of Britons andAfrican workers from British colonies.60 Attempts by German mineowners to recruit Indian indentured labour were, in fact, noted by theBritish consul in Lüderitz Bay, Müller, who had been stationed theresince 1909. He informed the British Foreign Office and the SouthAfrican government in detail about the German plans, and expressedhis own considerable misgivings:
I have cabled in this connection as it may be considered advis-able to inform the Indian Government as early as possible as towhat is going on. Attention has frequently been drawn to thecondition of natives in this country and Indian coolies accord-ing to existing laws come under the category of natives. InSamoa, where the labour difficulty is even greater, the GermanGovernment has been compelled to place the Chinese labour-er on the same level as the white. The Chinese Governmentprohibited its subjects from going to Samoa on any otherterms, owing to the complaints with regard to treatment, madeby Chinese labourers, who had gone thither on contract. If
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59 NAN BLU 30 (Imperial Government of German South-West Africa toImperial District Office Lüderitz Bay, 16 May 1912).60 NAN BLU 3 (transcript, enclosure to Blumhagen, Government of GermanSouth-West Africa to District Office Lüderitz Bay, 10 May 1912).
coolies are permitted to come to this country the conditionsshould be clearly understood beforehand.61
Nevertheless, despite these complications the German governmentdecided to grant the mine owners the permission they sought,because it was itself dependent on the high profits of diamond min-ing, and therefore wanted to oblige the entrepreneurs.62 The immi-gration of Indian indentured labour, however, had to be agreed withthe German Colonial Office in Berlin as well as with the British andIndian governments. The German Colonial Office should really haveknown that this venture had little chance of success.63 By this timeIndian indentured labourers worked almost exclusively in Britishcolonies. The Indian government permitted emigration only whereparticular standards were met, and German South-West Africa didnot want to guarantee these.64
Still, the German ambassador in London, Kühlmann, wrote to theBritish Foreign Secretary in August 1912, requesting permission for300 and later another 500 Indian indentured labourers to be taken toGerman South-West Africa and employed in the diamond mines atLüderitz Bay. The German Chamber of Mining promised to providethe Indians with adequate food and accommodation. However, theywere not permitted to travel to the interior of the colony and couldnot conduct any independent business. The Chamber of Mining hadalso undertaken to send the Indian workers back at the end of theircontracts.65 The Indian government refused to grant the Germansper mission to recruit, as German South-West Africa demanded
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61 NARS NTS 201 3038/12/7473 (transcript, Consul Müller to ForeignSecretary, 23 Apr. 1912).62 BAB R 1001/1232 (Governor of German South-West Africa to ImperialColonial Office Berlin, 20 Apr. 1912).63 In general, Berlin attempted to compile knowledge about Asian immi-grants and to learn from the other colonial empire, as is shown by thedetailed report ‘Treatment of Asians in Foreign Colonies’ (1912), which wasbased on official reports from the British colonies and on the Handbook ofBritish Colonies. See BAB R 1001/8731 (The Treatment of Asians in ForeignColonies, 1912), fos. 1–29.64 BAB R 1001/8747 (Schnee, Colonial Advisory Board to German ForeignOffice, Colonial Department, London, 26 Mar. 1906), fo. 142.65 NAN BCL 8 (transcript, Kühlman to Sir Edward Grey, 16 Aug. 1912).
immediate repatriation of the ‘coolies’.66 The mine owners nowattempted to hire Indians in Natal and the Cape Colony to work inthe German colony, as the recruiting of Indians who lived there andhad no further contractual obligations to fulfil was subject to no fur-ther restrictions.67 They had little success, however, as the Germancolony held few attractions for the Indians living there.68 Altogether,only around 200 to 250 Indians from the Cape and Natal ever lived inthe German colony as workers.
The Lüderitz Bay Chamber of Mining itself gave up trying to‘import’ Chinese workers when it became known in German South-West Africa that from 1912, Chinese in the German colony of Samoahad to be treated as ‘non-indigenous’.69 This had been preceded byprotracted negotiations between the German colonial administrationand the Chinese government.70 German South-West Africa wouldhave had to apply the same classification in 1912, as the Chinese gov-ernment would not have allowed Chinese indentured labourers to betreated as ‘indigenous’ in another German colony. Under no circum-stances did the Chamber of Mining want to employ Chinese workersunder similar conditions to Europeans, and therefore it abandonedthe whole undertaking.
The example of Indian and British indentured labour allows us toobserve the transfer of knowledge between colonial empires, andincreasing commercial and technical cooperation within Africa. Italso shows clearly how closely the colonies of various empires wereinvolved in the global streams of labour migration. While businesseswanted to take advantage of the chances offered by globalized migra-tion, the German colonial administration insisted on maintaining itsown national colonial policy, which was associated with certainracist notions. Similar conflicting tendencies can be found in theBritish colonies, as we have seen in British South Africa. In general,we clearly see the conflicting paradigms of globalization and nation-al demarcation in the colonial word of southern Africa.
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66 BAB R 1001/1232 (Crowe, Foreign Office, to Imperial German EmbassyLondon, 25 Sept. 1912).67 NAN ZBU 2076 W IV R2 (Lüderitz Bay Chamber of Mining to ConsulateDurban, 12 June 1912), fo. 49. 68 Ibid.69 NAN ZBU 2076 W IV R1 (Lüderitz Bay Chamber of Mining to GovernmentWindhoek, 25 Oct. 1912), fo. 48.70 Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, 216.
IV. Conclusion
These episodes from the history of the neighbouring colonies ofGerman South-West Africa and the Cape Colony demonstrate that—despite growing European rivalries—a considerable degree of inter-connectedness was achieved between the colonies, between differentcolonial empires, and across continents. This was only made possibleby technical globalization, which allowed not only information andgoods, but also people, to become increasingly mobile.71 These phe-nomena did not stop at the German and British colonies in Africa.The colonial powers were often forced to make use of existing tech-nical connections. Germany’s use of British telegraph cables is oneexample.
Even in a remote African colony, it was not possible to wage warwithout maintaining a complex network of interactions and relationswith neighbouring colonies, and the neighbouring European colo-nizers. The total dependence of German troops on food and suppliesfrom the Cape Colony placed German actions into a European imperi-al context. Moreover, it became clear that the war against the Hereroand Nama was being closely watched by the British colonial power.Direct observation by British officers of Germany’s conduct of the warserved to expand their own knowledge of colonial warfare. The criti-cisms they expressed of Germany’s inexperience and inflexibility wereused to present themselves as the better colonial military force, andthis also formed part of the public discussion in the mother land.
In the interactions around the indentured workers the Germancolonial administration and especially German entrepreneurswatched the British system of indentured labour closely and werekeen to adopt similar strategies.
Both examples, the Herero and Nama war as well as the case of the‘coolies’ in southern Africa, show forms of imperial comparison thatwere constitutive for the shaping of colonial policies and imperialidentities. In these processes, cooperation and demarcation were oftenclosely intertwined with each other.
We have also seen that in spite of many attempts at delimitation,the colonizers cooperated with each other in numerous situations in
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71 On the first wave of economic globalization before the First World War seeCornelius Torp, Die Herausforderung der Globalisierung: Wirtschaft und Politikin Deutschland 1860–1914 (Göttingen, 2005), 27–50.
the age of high imperialism. European supremacy over the indige-nous population in Africa was to be maintained without the expres-sion of any doubt or criticism. Other considerations were subordinateto this rule. Major conflicts between increasing globalization andracial and national demarcation in the age of high imperialism couldresult in upheavals even within a colony. On the whole, however,globalization and the trend towards interconnectedness significantlypromoted cooperation in the colonial world of Africa, and shaped thepolicy of the imperial rulers. Until the outbreak of the First WorldWar, mutual support between the imperial powers clearly predomi-nated. Thereafter, many cooperation processes were, of course, inter-rupted. Common imperial interests, however, were soon revived inmany ways: for example, in the discipline of African studies in the1920s, or in European policy towards Africa after the Second WorldWar.
To sum up, this article has shown that it makes sense to look atcolonial empires with the approach of an entangled history, and tofocus on relations, connections, and mutual observations betweencolonies. On the one hand, this opens up whole new areas of re -search, such as interactions concerning indentured labour; on theother, topics which have already been thoroughly researched, such asthe Herero and Nama war, are placed into a new perspective. Thusthe approach taken here has brought us to a more differentiatedunderstanding of the tensions of the imperial age. No longer domi-nated only by European rivalries and demarcation processes, thewhole picture has become far more complex.
Since 2009, ULRIKE LINDNER has been a senior lecturer in the fieldof global/transnational history in the Faculty of History at the Uni -versity of Bielefeld. She has recently finished her Habilitation, entitledColonial Encounters: Germany and Britain as European Imperial Powers inAfrica before World War I. Her publications include Hybrid Cultures,Nervous States: Germany and Britain in a (Post)Colonial World (2010, co-ed. with Maren Möhring, Mark Stein, and Silke Stroh); Gesund heits -politik in der Nachkriegszeit: Groβbritannien und die Bundesrepublik imVer gleich (2004); and Ärztinnen—Patientinnen: Frauen im deutschen undbritischen Gesundheitswesen des 20. Jahrhunderts (2002, co-ed. withMerith Niehuss).
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